After all, it's been more than 90 days since Edward Snowden last spoke in public. The few times he spoke through others since then are suspect -- the strange speech he supposedly gave to Jacob Appelbaum to read when he was awarded the German whistleblower prize in which he says rhetorically"It is not I, it is not I, it is not I" three times cryptically as if he were Everyman and Everyleaker makes me wonder especially what really happened to him.

Yes, I realize that more may be coming that will stir up the pot again. Or that some of the players in the drama might get arrested or at least questioned. I realize that the tight-knit circle of EFF and friends in WikiLeaks and Anonymous think that because Snowden and Assange got Obama and other world leaders to say that Snowden "started an important conversation" or that he "raised some significant issues" that they "won". (In fact, I'd never advocate any government official saying silly stuff like that, because it only lets the anarchists win and needlessly strengthens them.)

But the fact is, just getting rhetoric isn't a win, and they know that. And that's why, as I explain, they are discouraged and frustrated -- and I certainly regard this as a good thing.

Doesn't the radical Jay Rosen's cry of anguish about the failure of Silicon Valley to cover this in its owned tech press say it all?

On a scale of 100, my level of satisfaction, as a consumer of the tech press, in its coverage of the Snowden reverb in Silicon Valley: six.

Hendrik Hertzberg, in a New Yorker editorial early in the Snowden scandal on June 28 titled Some Dare Call it Treason, said he didn't believe Snowden was a traitor by the old Constitutional definition because he believed he had not given Aid and Comfort to our Enemies. Who but the coastal "progressive" elites could really believe that?

Hertzberg then said the classic New York liberal thing about the war on terrorism and in general America's enemies -- that unless we expose our secrecy even more thoroughly by proving that spying is effective (!), these skeptics won't be convinced:

That doesn’t mean, of course, that he hasn’t committed a crime or that no effort should be made to have him extradited and tried. It may be that his disclosures of N.S.A. surveillance and data-collection programs have done harm to national security and have made terrorist attacks more likely, though the Administration has not made a persuasive case that that is true. At this point, it’s hard to see what purpose is served by making him the object of a noisy, blustery, panicky global manhunt that risks damaging America’s ability to induce the Russian and Chinese autocrats to coöperate in more important matters.

In other words, Hertzberg seemed to be squarely within the liberal and leftist media's take on Snowden.

But interestingly enough, in an even earlier editorial, "Snoop Scoops" on June 24th, he said something actually a bit counterintuitive, given his "progressive" tone and actually said what I've been saying this whole time:

There are reasons to be concerned about intelligence-agency overreach, excessive secrecy, and lack of transparency. But there are also reasons to remain calm. From what we know so far about these N.S.A. programs—and that is a caveat that should condition virtually every statement and judgment about them, including those you are now reading—they have been conducted lawfully. The threat that they pose to civil liberties, such as it is, is abstract, conjectural, unspecified. In the roughly seven years the programs have been in place in roughly their present form, no citizen’s freedom of speech, expression, or association has been abridged by them in any identifiable way. No political critic of the Administration has been harassed or blackmailed as a consequence of them. They have not put the lives of tens of millions of Americans under “surveillance” as that word is commonly understood.

He then goes further and points out that nothing shown at that point indicated any content of phone calls:

“There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls,” the Times editorialized. True. But that’s a very big “except.” The bits that are collected consist of the time and the duration of the calls, along with the numbers and, potentially, the locations of the callers and the called. This “metadata” is digitally stored. But none of its individual components are ever seen by human eyes except in the comparatively tiny number of instances in which a computer algorithm flags one for further examination, in which case—at least, since 2008—a judicial warrant is legally required. “The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on ‘known or suspected terrorists’ without logging every call made,” the Times argued. True again—but circular, and beside the point. A primary (and legitimate) goal of the programs, after all, is to find and identify unknown, unsuspected terrorists, either after or, preferably, in advance of an actual attack.

Nothing has changed since then -- none of the revelations show access to
the body of texts and the content of calls and unlawful perusal of
these without a warrant in cases of suspicion of crime. The
"suspicionless" dredges that the activists are also talking about,
if/when they take place appear to be tied to intelligence targets that
are legitimate. They have never shown a case that isn't. Even

This is the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg who says it -- again!

No political critic of the Administration has been harassed or blackmailed as a consequence of them. They have not put the lives of tens of millions of Americans under “surveillance” as that word is commonly understood.

Not even John Smith or Jane Doe have been shown to have been accidentally and wrongfully put under surveillance -- or even Quinn Norton.

However, Hendrik Hertzberg isn't me, he's a New Yorker "progressive". So he adds:

The critics have been hard put to point to any tangible harm that has been done to any particular citizen. But that does not mean that no harm has been done. The harm is civic. The harm is collective. The harm is to the architecture of trust and accountability that supports an open society and a democratic polity. The harm is to the reputation and, perhaps, the reality of the United States as such a society, such a polity.

This seems to me to be hyperbolic and romantic -- and if anything the reverse is true -- Snowden and his G9 team of Greenwald, Poitras, Appelbaum and now even Jeremy Scahill are the ones causing collective and civic harm precisely by themselves attacking the architecture of trust in what is indeed an open society and democratic polity.

The trouble is - as those radical civil libertarians and crypterians at NYU complained -- the public, by and large, doesn't care. The vote in the Congress to curb the NSA failed. Maybe more legislation or reform of process is coming, but it isn't commanding a huge attention.

David Rieff wrote about this even weeks ago, Why Nobody Cares -- theorizing that maybe the lack of angst is because "massive surveillance" (not a phenomenon I believe in) wasn't a surprise:

Despite anger at Snowden and apocalyptic claims by government officials that he had gravely undermined their ability to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, it turned out that the "secret" he revealed appeared to be one of the most broadly shared secrets in the world. The White House knew, members of the Senate and House intelligence committees knew, and major U.S. allies like Britain and Germany not only knew but in some cases collaborated in the effort. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft may not have known everything, but unquestionably they knew something. The only group that did not know about PRISM was the general public.

But even after these revelations, writes Rieff, there just wasn't the backlash hoped for by activists:

And yet, apart from some voices from the antiwar left and the libertarian right (on foreign policy there is considerable overlap between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement), the reaction from this deceived public for the most part has been strangely muted. It is not just the somewhat contradictory nature of the polls taken this summer, which have shown the public almost evenly split on whether the seemingly unlimited scope of these surveillance programs was doing more harm than good. It is akso that, unlike on issues such as immigration and abortion, much of the public outrage presupposed by news coverage of the scandal does not, in reality, seem to exist.

Rieff gets in a good line describing the "guild" anger over Miranda's detention -- indeed, that's as far as it went, as non-journalists wondered why Greenwald was exploiting his husband as a mule and didn't share the sense of insiders that he should have journalistic immunity.

But...Strangely muted? Why strange? The reason is obvious: people do not think it is the infringement implied in general - they really don't care as they know deep down they're the ones to blame for so much private information spilled out in cyberspace.

More to the point, however, those who really think about this from a critical perspective -- even Hertzberg or perhaps especially Hertzberg are impressed that there's no there there. There are not cases.

Like Morozov, whom he admires, Rieff situates the problem we face as a function of techno-utopianism:

In an age dominated by various kinds of techno-utopianism -- the conviction that networking technologies inherently are politically and socially emancipatory and that massive data collection will unleash both efficiency in business and innovation in science -- the idea that Big Data might be your enemy and not your friend is antithetical to everything we have been encouraged to believe.

All together, techno-utopianism is looking a bit dented of late, particularly that variant of it that proclaimed social media to be at the heart of the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

So he seems to imply that if the public has grasped that technology
didn't turn out to be as liberating as we had thought -- it didn't work
in Iran, Egypt and lots of other places -- then maybe it isn't a
surprise that it "enslaves" us in a Panopticon.

Rieff even cites
Lanier -- he doesn't just read Morozov -- that "every time you post a
tweet attacking the 1 percent, you enrich some member of the 1 percent."

Viewed from this perspective, is it the general public's comparative lack of indignation over the NSA surveillance scandal that is surprising, or is the real shocker that journalists, activists, and politicians feel so outraged? Yes, the U.S. government is indeed the Biggest Brother of them all, but most people go about their daily business being spied on and having their data mined by any number of small- and medium-sized brothers. Of course, someone who is outraged by the attempts to jail the leakers and prosecute and intimidate their journalist and activist colleagues would insist, and rightly so, that these sorts of things should not be permitted in a democracy. But the gap between the outrage of the chattering classes and the public's apathy -- or, more likely, resignation -- illuminates the essential difference between the elite's understanding of the world and everyone else's. To put it starkly, members of an elite tend to believe they can change things; most everyone else knows that, except in a few rare instances, they cannot. In an essential sense, the real question for members of the elite is not, why isn't the public outraged, but why are we?

Rieff posits that the public is inured to the Surveillance State by having to face so many automatted processes -- from phone banking to the TSA -- that this NSA scandal just doesn't excite. He seems to think that if someone isn't bothered by the NSA spying or outraged at the prosecution of leakers, that they must not be part of the intelligentsia -- or be beaten down beyond belief. It's like Orwell's 1984: "“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

But what if it's entirely something else?

What if most people in fact didn't think much of Snowden -- not the least because he defected to Russia after being rejected for defection by China (!) - and because Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (Appelbaum is not known) have already alienated most people who aren't hard leftists or hard right-wing libertarians with all their other anti-American views?

What if even smart people in the liberal elite just weren't terribly impressed by the story because there is really no story?

Snowden hasn't spoken for three months now and the leaks coming out are technical, wonky and contrived. Hertzberg in fact explained this quite succinctly back on June 24. That happened to be the last day Snowden appeared in public and said something in person, as distinct from the two or three times since then that people representing him claimed he sent messages to them -- which didn't say much (and some were to unravel the scandal around his father and his lawyers, insisting that they didn't represent him).

Most people, even if they read the New York Times, don't read Empty Wheel (Marcy Wheeler) and don't watch Amy Goodman and don't listen to the ACLU or the EFF with any enthusiasm -- they are extremists, exotics.

The drama of Vladimir Putin showing up Obama over Syria, or the drama of the ObamaCare and government shutdown are far, far more compelling dramas for them.

The NSA, if it weren't in crouch and defense mode, and was moved more to counter-attack (most of the counter attacks have come from Michael Hayden, the former NSA official) might have taken the opportunity of the Kenyan terrorist attack to point out that tracking American jihadists to foreign lands and the recruitment of Americans by foreign terrorists are precisely the sort of things that NSA has to do, and do legitimately, and it was terribly hampered in doing this by Snowden's crippling actions. It didn't.

The NSA didn't stop its surveillance and continues its work. Some of its people are involved in damage control and working with Congress, but it's not shut down. It will tighten up the hatches and check the hacker youths more carefully but it doesn't seem as if its core mission is compromised now or in the near future.

Even if Snowden's next revelations includes something very personal and very scandalous -- Scahill has already hinted it involves assassinations abroad involving NSA help -- it is unlikely to turn Americans against their government. No one, least of all Obama and his loyal supporters, are going to complain that Osama was assassinated -- and BTW, more HUMINT than SIGINT had to be used in that operation obviously.

I think we have to pay attention when those who essentially are on Snowden's side and believe he's a whistleblower -- like Hertzberg and Rieff in their different ways -- think forlornly that ultimately the hack didn't effect change.

"It doesn't matter" as comedian Loren Feldman often says about this or that tech scandal each week -- and who had little to say in fact about Snowdenor Manning as compared to every other tech story."It doesn't matter."

After all, it's been more than 90 days since Edward Snowden last spoke in public. The few times he spoke through others since then are suspect -- the strange speech he supposedly gave to Jacob Appelbaum to read when he was awarded the German whistleblower prize in which he says rhetorically"It is not I, it is not I, it is not I" three times cryptically as if he were Everyman and Everyleaker makes me wonder especially what really happened to him.

Yes, I realize that more may be coming that will stir up the pot again. Or that some of the players in the drama might get arrested or at least questioned. I realize that the tight-knit circle of EFF and friends in WikiLeaks and Anonymous think that because Snowden and Assange got Obama and other world leaders to say that Snowden "started an important conversation" or that he "raised some significant issues" that they "won". (In fact, I'd never advocate any government official saying silly stuff like that, because it only lets the anarchists win and needlessly strengthens them.)

But the fact is, just getting rhetoric isn't a win, and they know that. And that's why, as I explain, they are discouraged and frustrated -- and I certainly regard this as a good thing.

Doesn't the radical Jay Rosen's cry of anguish about the failure of Silicon Valley to cover this in its owned tech press say it all?

On a scale of 100, my level of satisfaction, as a consumer of the tech press, in its coverage of the Snowden reverb in Silicon Valley: six.

Hendrik Hertzberg, in a New Yorker editorial early in the Snowden scandal on June 28 titled Some Dare Call it Treason, said he didn't believe Snowden was a traitor by the old Constitutional definition because he believed he had not given Aid and Comfort to our Enemies. Who but the coastal "progressive" elites could really believe that?

Hertzberg then said the classic New York liberal thing about the war on terrorism and in general America's enemies -- that unless we expose our secrecy even more thoroughly by proving that spying is effective (!), these skeptics won't be convinced:

That doesn’t mean, of course, that he hasn’t committed a crime or that no effort should be made to have him extradited and tried. It may be that his disclosures of N.S.A. surveillance and data-collection programs have done harm to national security and have made terrorist attacks more likely, though the Administration has not made a persuasive case that that is true. At this point, it’s hard to see what purpose is served by making him the object of a noisy, blustery, panicky global manhunt that risks damaging America’s ability to induce the Russian and Chinese autocrats to coöperate in more important matters.

In other words, Hertzberg seemed to be squarely within the liberal and leftist media's take on Snowden.

But interestingly enough, in an even earlier editorial, "Snoop Scoops" on June 24th, he said something actually a bit counterintuitive, given his "progressive" tone and actually said what I've been saying this whole time:

There are reasons to be concerned about intelligence-agency overreach, excessive secrecy, and lack of transparency. But there are also reasons to remain calm. From what we know so far about these N.S.A. programs—and that is a caveat that should condition virtually every statement and judgment about them, including those you are now reading—they have been conducted lawfully. The threat that they pose to civil liberties, such as it is, is abstract, conjectural, unspecified. In the roughly seven years the programs have been in place in roughly their present form, no citizen’s freedom of speech, expression, or association has been abridged by them in any identifiable way. No political critic of the Administration has been harassed or blackmailed as a consequence of them. They have not put the lives of tens of millions of Americans under “surveillance” as that word is commonly understood.

He then goes further and points out that nothing shown at that point indicated any content of phone calls:

“There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls,” the Times editorialized. True. But that’s a very big “except.” The bits that are collected consist of the time and the duration of the calls, along with the numbers and, potentially, the locations of the callers and the called. This “metadata” is digitally stored. But none of its individual components are ever seen by human eyes except in the comparatively tiny number of instances in which a computer algorithm flags one for further examination, in which case—at least, since 2008—a judicial warrant is legally required. “The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on ‘known or suspected terrorists’ without logging every call made,” the Times argued. True again—but circular, and beside the point. A primary (and legitimate) goal of the programs, after all, is to find and identify unknown, unsuspected terrorists, either after or, preferably, in advance of an actual attack.

Nothing has changed since then -- none of the revelations show access to
the body of texts and the content of calls and unlawful perusal of
these without a warrant in cases of suspicion of crime. The
"suspicionless" dredges that the activists are also talking about,
if/when they take place appear to be tied to intelligence targets that
are legitimate. They have never shown a case that isn't. Even

This is the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg who says it -- again!

No political critic of the Administration has been harassed or blackmailed as a consequence of them. They have not put the lives of tens of millions of Americans under “surveillance” as that word is commonly understood.

Not even John Smith or Jane Doe have been shown to have been accidentally and wrongfully put under surveillance -- or even Quinn Norton.

However, Hendrik Hertzberg isn't me, he's a New Yorker "progressive". So he adds:

The critics have been hard put to point to any tangible harm that has been done to any particular citizen. But that does not mean that no harm has been done. The harm is civic. The harm is collective. The harm is to the architecture of trust and accountability that supports an open society and a democratic polity. The harm is to the reputation and, perhaps, the reality of the United States as such a society, such a polity.

This seems to me to be hyperbolic and romantic -- and if anything the reverse is true -- Snowden and his G9 team of Greenwald, Poitras, Appelbaum and now even Jeremy Scahill are the ones causing collective and civic harm precisely by themselves attacking the architecture of trust in what is indeed an open society and democratic polity.

The trouble is - as those radical civil libertarians and crypterians at NYU complained -- the public, by and large, doesn't care. The vote in the Congress to curb the NSA failed. Maybe more legislation or reform of process is coming, but it isn't commanding a huge attention.

David Rieff wrote about this even weeks ago, Why Nobody Cares -- theorizing that maybe the lack of angst is because "massive surveillance" (not a phenomenon I believe in) wasn't a surprise:

Despite anger at Snowden and apocalyptic claims by government officials that he had gravely undermined their ability to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, it turned out that the "secret" he revealed appeared to be one of the most broadly shared secrets in the world. The White House knew, members of the Senate and House intelligence committees knew, and major U.S. allies like Britain and Germany not only knew but in some cases collaborated in the effort. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft may not have known everything, but unquestionably they knew something. The only group that did not know about PRISM was the general public.

But even after these revelations, writes Rieff, there just wasn't the backlash hoped for by activists:

And yet, apart from some voices from the antiwar left and the libertarian right (on foreign policy there is considerable overlap between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement), the reaction from this deceived public for the most part has been strangely muted. It is not just the somewhat contradictory nature of the polls taken this summer, which have shown the public almost evenly split on whether the seemingly unlimited scope of these surveillance programs was doing more harm than good. It is akso that, unlike on issues such as immigration and abortion, much of the public outrage presupposed by news coverage of the scandal does not, in reality, seem to exist.

Rieff gets in a good line describing the "guild" anger over Miranda's detention -- indeed, that's as far as it went, as non-journalists wondered why Greenwald was exploiting his husband as a mule and didn't share the sense of insiders that he should have journalistic immunity.

But...Strangely muted? Why strange? The reason is obvious: people do not think it is the infringement implied in general - they really don't care as they know deep down they're the ones to blame for so much private information spilled out in cyberspace.

More to the point, however, those who really think about this from a critical perspective -- even Hertzberg or perhaps especially Hertzberg are impressed that there's no there there. There are not cases.

Like Morozov, whom he admires, Rieff situates the problem we face as a function of techno-utopianism:

In an age dominated by various kinds of techno-utopianism -- the conviction that networking technologies inherently are politically and socially emancipatory and that massive data collection will unleash both efficiency in business and innovation in science -- the idea that Big Data might be your enemy and not your friend is antithetical to everything we have been encouraged to believe.

All together, techno-utopianism is looking a bit dented of late, particularly that variant of it that proclaimed social media to be at the heart of the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

So he seems to imply that if the public has grasped that technology
didn't turn out to be as liberating as we had thought -- it didn't work
in Iran, Egypt and lots of other places -- then maybe it isn't a
surprise that it "enslaves" us in a Panopticon.

Rieff even cites
Lanier -- he doesn't just read Morozov -- that "every time you post a
tweet attacking the 1 percent, you enrich some member of the 1 percent."

Viewed from this perspective, is it the general public's comparative lack of indignation over the NSA surveillance scandal that is surprising, or is the real shocker that journalists, activists, and politicians feel so outraged? Yes, the U.S. government is indeed the Biggest Brother of them all, but most people go about their daily business being spied on and having their data mined by any number of small- and medium-sized brothers. Of course, someone who is outraged by the attempts to jail the leakers and prosecute and intimidate their journalist and activist colleagues would insist, and rightly so, that these sorts of things should not be permitted in a democracy. But the gap between the outrage of the chattering classes and the public's apathy -- or, more likely, resignation -- illuminates the essential difference between the elite's understanding of the world and everyone else's. To put it starkly, members of an elite tend to believe they can change things; most everyone else knows that, except in a few rare instances, they cannot. In an essential sense, the real question for members of the elite is not, why isn't the public outraged, but why are we?

Rieff posits that the public is inured to the Surveillance State by having to face so many automatted processes -- from phone banking to the TSA -- that this NSA scandal just doesn't excite. He seems to think that if someone isn't bothered by the NSA spying or outraged at the prosecution of leakers, that they must not be part of the intelligentsia -- or be beaten down beyond belief. It's like Orwell's 1984: "“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

But what if it's entirely something else?

What if most people in fact didn't think much of Snowden -- not the least because he defected to Russia after being rejected for defection by China (!) - and because Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (Appelbaum is not known) have already alienated most people who aren't hard leftists or hard right-wing libertarians with all their other anti-American views?

What if even smart people in the liberal elite just weren't terribly impressed by the story because there is really no story?

Snowden hasn't spoken for three months now and the leaks coming out are technical, wonky and contrived. Hertzberg in fact explained this quite succinctly back on June 24. That happened to be the last day Snowden appeared in public and said something in person, as distinct from the two or three times since then that people representing him claimed he sent messages to them -- which didn't say much (and some were to unravel the scandal around his father and his lawyers, insisting that they didn't represent him).

Most people, even if they read the New York Times, don't read Empty Wheel (Marcy Wheeler) and don't watch Amy Goodman and don't listen to the ACLU or the EFF with any enthusiasm -- they are extremists, exotics.

The drama of Vladimir Putin showing up Obama over Syria, or the drama of the ObamaCare and government shutdown are far, far more compelling dramas for them.

The NSA, if it weren't in crouch and defense mode, and was moved more to counter-attack (most of the counter attacks have come from Michael Hayden, the former NSA official) might have taken the opportunity of the Kenyan terrorist attack to point out that tracking American jihadists to foreign lands and the recruitment of Americans by foreign terrorists are precisely the sort of things that NSA has to do, and do legitimately, and it was terribly hampered in doing this by Snowden's crippling actions. It didn't.

The NSA didn't stop its surveillance and continues its work. Some of its people are involved in damage control and working with Congress, but it's not shut down. It will tighten up the hatches and check the hacker youths more carefully but it doesn't seem as if its core mission is compromised now or in the near future.

Even if Snowden's next revelations includes something very personal and very scandalous -- Scahill has already hinted it involves assassinations abroad involving NSA help -- it is unlikely to turn Americans against their government. No one, least of all Obama and his loyal supporters, are going to complain that Osama was assassinated -- and BTW, more HUMINT than SIGINT had to be used in that operation obviously.

I think we have to pay attention when those who essentially are on Snowden's side and believe he's a whistleblower -- like Hertzberg and Rieff in their different ways -- think forlornly that ultimately the hack didn't effect change.

"It doesn't matter" as comedian Loren Feldman often says about this or that tech scandal each week -- and who had little to say in fact about Snowdenor Manning as compared to every other tech story."It doesn't matter."